Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“Democracy is no longer writing the rules for capitalism; instead it is the other way around. With his deep insight and wide learning, Kuttner is among our best guides for understanding how we reached this point and what’s at stake if we stay on our current path.”—Heather McGhee, president of Demos
With a new Afterword
In the past few decades, the wages of most workers have stagnated, even as productivity increased. Social supports have been cut, while corporations have achieved record profits. What is going on? According to Robert Kuttner, global capitalism is to blame. By limiting workers’ rights, liberating bankers, and allowing corporations to evade taxation, raw capitalism strikes at the very foundation of a healthy democracy. Capitalism should serve democracy and not the other way around. One result of this misunderstanding is the large number of disillusioned voters who supported the faux populism of Donald Trump. Charting a plan for bold action based on political precedent, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? is essential reading for anyone eager to reverse the decline of democracy in the West.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Americans still struggling to comprehend the election of President Trump will find American Prospect coeditor Kuttner's cogent analysis illuminating. His critique of the Clinton campaign, which echoes and expands on Mark Lilla's controversial New York Times op-ed "The End of Identity Liberalism," is woven into a much broader survey of recent trends both national and international that have put liberal democracy in retreat across the world. Kuttner links that development, and the related potential resurgence of fascism, to globalization, which writers such as Thomas Friedman generally view as an unmitigated good. The reality, as Kuttner sees it, is that the "deregulation of constraints on transnational movements of money, products, service and labor" changes "the political distribution of power domestically" and increases the "influence of elites" who support globalization. He builds his case methodically and in a manner accessible to lay readers without a background in economics, looking at how tighter governmental controls impacted powerful financial institutions over the past century. However, even those who share his perspective may not necessarily share his optimism that the Democrats will choose a progressive standard-bearer in 2020, or that such a candidate would prevail against Trump's brand of populism. As such, Kuttner's analysis is thought-provoking but not fully convincing.
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